The Rhymer

Allan McAulay

The Rhymer

Published by Good Press, 2022

goodpress@okpublishing.info

EAN 4064066093525

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CHAPTER I.

In the year of grace 1787, Mr. Graham of The Mains, a worthy gentleman and laird of the county of Perth, had a family of seven daughters. This, though hardly at that date amounting to a social crime, was an indiscretion in a man of few acres and modest income. Moreover, his partner in life was even now a blooming and a buxom dame, capable of adding further olive branches to the already over-umbrageous family tree. She had, indeed, but lately performed the somewhat procrastinated duty of adding an heir to the tale of the seven lasses of The Mains. This was as it should be—but it was quite enough.

It was market day in the autumn of the year, and Mr. Graham, who farmed his own land, had attended the weekly market at the country town of C——. He was about to jog home in the dusk, when he was accosted by a neighbour and fellow-laird.

'Hey—Mains!' called out this personage. 'Bide a bit, man! It is in my mind to do you and the mistress at The Mains a good turn.' Mr. Graham drew rein.

'It is not I that will miss a chance of that,' he observed, in good humour.

'Well, to be straight to the point,' said his friend, 'I have a friend biding with me at this time, one Jimmy Cheape—you may have heard me speak of him, for he was a crony of our college days. He is a man of substance in the county of Fife—and he has a mind to be made acquainted with you and your lady.'

'Ay, ay!' ejaculated Mr. Graham. 'A most laudable and polite wish, truly, and not to be gainsaid!'

'He is in search of a wife,' said the friend, slily, with a dig in the ribs of the laird with the butt-end of his whip, 'and I bethought me that a presentation to a man with seven daughters was the very thing to be useful. So I promised it, and he jumped for it—as keen as a cock at a groset.'

Mr. Graham pricked up his ears.

'That's the wife's business rather than mine,' he observed, cautiously.

'Well! let the wife see him, but see him yourself first. Yonder he is.' The speaker pointed to a burly form, standing with its back to the friends. 'I will bring him forward;' and he proceeded to be as good as his word.

When Mr. Cheape, of the county of Fife, presented his countenance to his possible father-in-law of the future, he was found to be a gentleman of decidedly mature age, already grey, deeply pitted with the smallpox, and of no very alluring address. His salutation was gruff, and his eye shifty.

'To-morrow,' he remarked, with rather alarming abruptness, immediately after the form of introduction had been gone through, 'I will wait upon Mrs. Graham at The Mains, at about eleven of the clock in the morning.' With that he stumped off, for he added to his other peculiarities that of being rather lame of one leg.

'Ah! he means business, you see!' said the intermediary, admiringly. The corners of Mr. Graham's mouth, which had taken an upward inclination at the first salutation of his friend, now drooped considerably, as he gazed after his new acquaintance.

'He is somewhat well on in years,' he remarked, dubiously, 'and there is not that about him that will take a lass's fancy.'

'Tut!' said his friend, 'there is well-nigh one thousand a year about him and his bonny bit place of Kincarley in the county of Fife; and he has fine store of plate and plenishing of linen—so he tells me—as well as the siller. And that takes a lass's fancy fast enough, let me tell you.'

'Well, maybe,' said the laird, and he gave the reins a jog. 'Good-night to you, and you shall hear what betides.'

Mr. Graham jogged home along the muddy roads towards The Mains in a meditative mood. The thought of his seven daughters often sat heavy on his mind. He could not portion them, and, with or without portions, it was difficult to imagine how they could marry or settle in a part of the country so remote, that society could hardly be said to exist—daughters, as they were, of a man who could not possibly afford to send them to share the gaieties of the capital, or even of the distant county town. Yet their marriage was a fixed idea with his wife, as he well knew—the only idea, indeed, for their future which it was natural and proper, at that day, for her to entertain. Alison, their eldest girl, was almost twenty, and at that age her mother had been already three years married and had a thriving nursery; two others, well arrived at woman's estate, trod closely on her heels. Very well indeed could the laird imagine with what enthusiasm his partner would welcome the advent of a suitor, and a wealthy suitor, too. Yet he had vague doubts as to whether he should have placed this temptation within reach of the eager mother of seven daughters. Perhaps it would have been better to have declined the visit from Mr. Cheape once for all. For although this obscure country laird of old-time Scotland had a rough exterior, not differing greatly from that of a farmer or yeoman of the better class, and though he rode a horse that sometimes drew the plough, a clumsy figure in his brass-buttoned blue coat and miry buckskins, yet he was a gentleman at heart, and an honest man to boot. He had been far from admiring the exterior and address of Mr. Cheape of Kincarley, and compunction assailed him when he thought of his Alison, or Kate, or Maggie, subjected to the wooing of such a bear. However, it was their mother's affair, he thought, with that comfortable shifting of responsibility on to feminine shoulders which man has so gracefully inherited from Adam. Besides, he looked forward to telling the news, being a bit of a humorist in his own way. So he whipped up the old horse into a heavy trot.

The Mains lay low and sheltered in the heart of an uninteresting agricultural corner of the Perthshire lowlands. It was a low, rambling, old house, of no pretensions—little better, indeed, than a farm—with small windows in thick walls, and little low-ceilinged, ill-lighted rooms. There were some fine sycamores about it, the abode of an ancient rookery, and a grand lime tree grew in the field in front of the house—so very old that no one knew or could guess its age. To the east of The Mains lay its farm buildings, and beyond them again the old-fashioned tangled garden. Further, and around on all sides, were thick spruce woods, where the wild pigeons crooned in the summer, and there were always cones for the gathering. Through gaps in the woods, and from certain points of vantage on The Mains's land, you could see the Highland hills. But to Alison and her little sisters these always seemed far, far away—as though in another country altogether.

Lights in the deep-set windows welcomed the laird, and they were cheery in the damp murk of the autumn evening. When he was divested of his mud-stiffened riding gear, he stretched himself at ease before the crackling fire in his own sanctum, and his lady joined him. It was a long, low, dark room, lined with fusty books, which no one ever took from the shelves. The mantelpiece was of solid stone, washed a pale green, and—chiseled roughly—just below the shelf was a motto, rudely finished off with a clam-shell, the crest of the Grahams:—

'In human life there's nothing steadfast stands,

Youth, Glorie, Riches fade. Death's sure at hand.'

So it said. But neither the laird nor the lady of The Mains had any air of paying attention to this warning of a somewhat despondent progenitor.

The mistress of the house was a handsome woman still, in spite of household and maternal cares. Above the middle height, and of comely figure, she had hair still raven black, a glowing colour in her soft unwithered cheek, and the light of a strong and unimpaired vitality in her fine, though rather hard, black eye. She had the complete empire over her husband, which such a woman will ever have over men—a woman, healthy, fresh, strong-willed, though not moulded, perhaps, in the most refined of nature's moulds. He had married her in his youth—the daughter of a small Glasgow lawyer, hardly, perhaps, his equal from a social point of view. But this was a failing soon overlooked in the blooming, hearty, managing bride, who brought fresh blood to mingle with the rather attenuated strain of a genteel Scottish family, which boasted more lineage than looks.

The laird stretched himself to the genial warmth, and prepared to enjoy the communication of his bit of news.

'A gentleman is to visit us here at The Mains to-morrow in the morning, wife,' he began, casually.

'Oh, ay,' said Mrs. Graham, in the tone of one who expects no pleasant surprises. 'It'll be Cultobanocher or Drumore, likely, to speir about the grey mare and her foal.'

'Not at all,' said the laird, 'but a stranger this time—one Cheape of Kincarley, in the county of Fife, at this time abiding with Drumore.'

'And what will he be wanting with us?' inquired the mistress of The Mains.

'A wife, it would seem,' said the laird, in a carefully-suppressed tone of voice, but a twinkle in his eye.

'Tut, laird!' said the lady, crossly, 'you're joking, but none of your jokes for me!' She indeed believed the news too good to be true, and was wroth with the laird for tantalising her on so tender a subject.

'I am not joking—not I,' protested the husband and father. ''Tis the living truth, as I sit here. This fellow will be over here to-morrow at noon to see if he cannot choose a wife among our seven lasses.'

Then followed, in answer to a rain of questions from the excited lady, a full and particular account of Mr. Cheape, his means and estate—all, indeed, that the laird could tell. Mrs. Graham's face was flushed, her eyes sparkling; the corners of her full, firm mouth twitched with eagerness. Before the conversation was half over, she had the wedding settled in her mind, with already a side-thought for the bride's dress, and such scanty plenishing as could be spared from The Mains.

'And to think that I was putting poor Ally down for an old maid!' she exclaimed, rapturously. 'The girl with never a man after her yet, and then to have this rich husband flung at her head! She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, after all—poor Ally!'

'Bide a wee!' said the laird, cautiously. 'Wait till you see the man, my woman! A grey beard, even like myself, and speckled like a puddock wi' the cow-pox. I doubt the girl will get a scunner when she sees him.'

But his partner pounced upon his doubts with righteous anger.

'Laird,' she said, 'if I see you putting the like o' that into Ally's head, I'll be at the end of my patience. Setting the lass against her meat that gait—such foolery!'

'Lasses think of love—' began the laird.

'Love, indeed!' almost screamed the lady; 'and what right has she to think of love, and her almost twenty, and never a jo to her name yet, or a man's kiss but her father's on the cheek o' her? When I was her age, well knew I what love was; but she—let her thank her stars she's got this chance, and needna pine a spinster all her days!'

'Well, well,' said the laird, uncomfortably, 'manage it your own way. I'll keep my fingers out of the pie. And sort you Mr. Cheape of Kincarley when he comes to-morrow, for I'll ha' none of him!'

His lady, finding he would respond on the subject no longer, bustled off to her daughter.

CHAPTER II.

'Ally, Ally!' she called in her clear, strong voice all over the house, 'where are you, Ally?' and through the darkening passages she went in eager search of her eldest daughter. The seven lasses of The Mains were variously disposed of in the old warren of a house—in the lesser rooms, in the attics under the roof, reached by a spiral wooden stair, on which their young feet clattered up and down from early morn till early bed-time.

At this moment Alison was putting to bed her two-year-old brother, the 'young laird,' and apple of all eyes at The Mains. She sat with him in her arms at the tiny window of the nursery and crooned him to sleep, and as she sang she looked out at the murky red sky behind the plane trees, at the rooks circling and cawing on their way to bed, at the old lime, a towering mass of black shadow in the gloaming. This was the scene that Alison looked upon continually every evening of her life—this young woman without lovers and innocent of kisses.

Mrs. Graham was breathing rather quickly by the time she stood at the nursery door, and her first elated sentences were somewhat breathless.

'Braw news your father has brought home for you to-night, Ally!' she began.

'Wheesht, mother!' said Alison, 'you will waken Jacky.'

'Ah!' said Mrs. Graham, knowingly, 'you'll soon have done with Jacky now!'

'Sure,' said Alison, lifting round grey eyes to her mother's face, and pressing Jacky's head close to her shoulder, 'I've no wish to be done with Jacky;' and she put a kiss on the boy's curls.

'Tut!' said Mrs. Graham, impatiently, 'you might have little Jackys of your own. Think you never of that, Ally?' Alison blushed in the dark: it was not a fair question. Jacky was so sound asleep by this time that the voices did not wake him, and she rose, laid him on the wooden cot beside her own bed, and happed the clothes about him with deft movements full of a natural motherliness.

'Come down now, Ally,' said her mother, 'I want you.'

Alison obeyed her mother, as hitherto she had always done, in the simple management of her life.

'You are to get a man, Ally, after all,' said the lady, impressively. 'A husband, and a good one. Isn't that the brawest news ever you've heard yet?'

Alison was not quite certain, but there is no doubt, simple soul that she was, that she was impressed and awed, and that a flutter disturbed her quiet heart. Alison had never read even the few romances of her day, and knew nothing about love; and although she sang, in her sweet, untrained voice, as she went about the house, the love-songs of her country, often piercing in their pathos and passion—their language was a sealed book to her. True, Kirsty the dairy-maid had a lover who put an arm round her willing waist, and Alison had seen the pair walking so, in many a gloaming, by the gate of the cow-park. Would she have a lover now, and an arm round her waist? Mrs. Graham did not dwell on such things in the present interview with her daughter; but she spoke of Mr. Cheape of Kincarley with solemn impressiveness; of his house and his lands, and his plate and his linen, and Alison was no unwilling listener. It was a calm-blooded, unawakened nature, this of Alison's yet, moulded in the dim monotony of obscure country life, in daily performance of humble duties; a heart stirred yet by no passion more mastering than a sister's matter-of-course love for other sisters, and the little brother, born so late. She was a sensible, steady girl, yet only a girl, after all; and I do not say, that night, as she lay down in her narrow, hard bed beside the softly-breathing baby-brother, that she did not dream of a bridegroom and a wedding-dress.

Next morning, at the usual hour, Alison attended to one of her accustomed duties, the care of a flock of young turkeys, in a meadow by the farm. They were a late brood, and the object of Alison's most anxious solicitude. This morning her mother had commanded her to put on a better gown than usual, and to place upon her curls a fine mob-cap of lace and cambric, whose flapping frills annoyed her. It was an antique piece of finery, belonging to her mother's girlhood rather than to hers; but fashions at The Mains were not advanced. Alison's looks were not thought greatly of by her parents. She lacked her mother's brilliant colouring and bold, black-eyed beauty. She was rather pale, indeed, though with a healthy, even pallor that a touch of cold wind or a little exertion easily brightened into a pleasing softness of pink. Her hair, which would never grow beyond her shoulders for length, curled all about her ears and neck—tendrils borrowed from the stubborn, reddish locks of her father, only they were not red, but of a light, sunny brown. Her face had the calmness and strength of clear-cut features, and she was tall beyond the common, well and strongly made. Not an unpleasing figure at all was she, as she stood calling to her turkeys, the autumn sun catching at her hair, and shining in her grey eyes. Yet the hearts of her parents misgave them, as they saw her, lest she should fail to find favour in the eyes of Mr. Cheape of Kincarley.

For Mr. Cheape had arrived, and, with laudable punctuality, had stumped into the library, where the laird, who had been talked round the night before into a temporary acquiescence in his suit, waited to receive him. To the pair, presently entered the lady of the house in her Sunday silk, and genteelest manners. A gruff nod to the laird, and a stiff inclination to his dame, was all the salutation vouchsafed by Mr. Cheape, who then stood hitting at his boots with the whip in his hand, and grunting at intervals.

''Tis a fine morning for the time of the year, and grand for lifting the neeps,' began the laird, with a cough.

Mr. Cheape snorted. 'I'm not here,' he remarked, with plainness, 'to discuss the weather and turnips. I'm come, ma'am, to be presented to your daughters;' and he ignored the laird, and addressed himself to the lady.

'To my Daughter Alison, doubtless?' said Mrs. Graham, with polite firmness.

'Hum,' said Mr. Cheape, 'I understood there were seven of them.'

'We are blessed with seven girls, indeed,' said Mrs. Graham, majestically. 'But our daughter Alison is the only one from whom we could think of parting ourselves at this time. The rest'—coolly—'are bairns.'

'I should like to see them all,' objected the suitor, who felt himself being 'done.'

'You will see Alison,' said Mrs. Graham, composedly. 'You must e'en take them as the Lord gave them—or want!' she added, with spirit. ('To think,' as she said to her husband afterwards, 'if I hadna been canny—he might ha' taken Susie or Maggie, as likely as not—and left Ally on our hands!')

'Mr. Cheape is pleased to be plain and to the point,' here interrupted the laird, not without sarcasm in his tone, which, however, was quite lost upon his visitor. 'We have, indeed, seven lasses, and little to give them, sir, and cannot therefore be over nice in the matter of their wooing. Alison is at her turkeys in the east meadow, wife. Supposing we conduct this gentleman to the spot, and see if he is inclined to make a bargain of it?'

So Alison's fate approached her in this quaint fashion, Mr. Cheape stumping at her mother's side, and the laird bringing up the rear, with a comical eye on the suitor's burly back. They paused at a gate where Alison could not see them, but they could see her in a patch of sun, with the turkeys picking and cheeping at her feet. 'Is that the one?' said Mr. Cheape, pointing at the object of his wooing with his whip.

'Our daughter Alison,' said Mrs. Graham, complacently, with an introductory wave of the hand. 'But twenty, come the New Year time,' for she much feared that Alison looked older.

Mr. Cheape seemed lost in thought and calculation. 'A knowledge of fowls,' he said at last, heavily, 'is useful in a female.'

''Tis indispensable in the lady of a country mansion,' said Mrs. Graham, cheerfully. 'And none beats Alison at that, let me tell you!'

'Alison, come here!' called her father. Alison turned round and obeyed. When she approached the group which held her suitor, she curtseyed, but the behaviour of Mr. Cheape at this juncture was so singular and so disconcerting, that there was no time for a formal introduction between the two. Whether it was the wide, all-too-frankly astonished gaze of Alison's grey eyes, or the young lady's imposing height, or simply a fit of bashfulness that overpowered him, cannot be said. But merely the fact can be given, that at this delicate juncture the gallant wooer, with a fiercer grunt than usual, and some muttered exclamation which no one caught, incontinently turned tail and fled towards the house, the distracted matron almost running in his wake. Alison and her father were left together.

'Is that Mr. Cheape, sir?' enquired the daughter, gravely.

'Ay, lass,' said the laird. ''Tis even the great Mr. Cheape of Kincarley, in the county of Fife!'

Alison said nothing, but with her chin in the air, and lilting the flounces of her good dress above the wet grass she went back to her turkeys. Her father laughed his jolly laugh. 'He will have none of you, Ally, that's plain!' he called after her. 'So don't you be losing your heart to his bonny face, I warn you!'

CHAPTER III.

But so very far was the laird of The Mains from being accurate in his assertion of Mr. Cheape's indifference to his daughter's charms, that when he re-entered the library, which he presently did, he found that gentleman and his wife in the closest confabulation, the subject of their discourse being no other than that of a contract of marriage between Miss Graham of The Mains, and Mr. Cheape of Kincarley. The latter gentleman appeared now to be much easier of demeanour.

'These matters,' he observed, almost jocularly, 'are better settled without the presence of the lady!'

'But, God bless my soul!' cried the laird, 'you hardly saw the girl, or she you—'

'Oh, she'll do, she'll do,' said Mr. Cheape, with an agreeable grunt, but an air of hurry. 'An' now I must